Mediation
Circa 2016—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (Colour), Text
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I’ve been in Hong Kong for almost ten years now. That thought hits as I glance up at a billboard on Bristol Avenue. A woman, mid-forkful of spaghetti, beams down and in cursive script proclaims:
Live Italian. Live with passion!
Her charisma is all carbs and confidence. Being half Neapolitan, I feel mildly judged—but only halfway. I clock the message and make a quiet deal with myself to step outside my comfort zone more often. A forkful of courage at a time.
People describe Italy as an open-air museum, un museo all’aperto. But doesn’t every place, in its own way, archive itself? Some preserve marble ruins. Others wrap themselves in layers of red, white, and blue canvas, or flyers pasted to shuttered shopfronts. These are the palimpsests of the everyday. The city speaks through them, even as it forgets what it just said.
Ackbar Abbas called it déjà disparu: disappearance as arrival. A kind of reverse hallucination, where what is most present is already slipping through our fingers. In Hong Kong, I’ve learned to see in this register—to tune into the frequencies beneath the surface noise, to feel the texture of what’s vanishing, even as it forms.
Joanna Macy, speaking of Rilke, said we must ‘teach ourselves how to see beauty. How to treasure it. How to celebrate it. How, if it must disappear—if there’s dying—how to be grateful.’1
Maybe that’s the invitation: not to hold on, but to look again. To live with the grain of disappearance. To find beauty not in what lasts, but in what flickers—what is glimpsed, then gone.
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Footnote:
- Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us, in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, Apple Podcasts audio, July 22, 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000718497545.